9 Great Inbound Marketing Tips for Online Businesses

In the modern world of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and online businesses, inbound marketing is the best way to reach any customer base from small-town home services to huge B2B suppliers. Everyone starts their shopping and problem solving on a search engine. And most people wouldn’t dream of making a financial decision before researching a topic online first. The more content you create and the more appealing your online presence is. As a result, the larger an audience you can attract and convert into paying customers. If you have an online business or even a brick-and-mortar establishment with an online sales channel, you have a lot to gain from even a little inbound marketing. Here’s a quick summary of tactics to help you get started.

1. Start With a Great Website

The entire point of inbound marketing is to draw an audience of potential customers inward toward your website. To browse your content, see your products, and eventually lead to sales. This means that for any inbound marketing to work, you need a fantastic website for your audience to land on. Whether you choose to host through a well-known and proven platform for online businesses like WordPress or Woo Commerce or design your website from scratch is up to you. Just make sure it allows your customers to access your content and services. The key here is to ensure your message is clear and concise.

2. Create Interesting and Informative Content

Of course, even beautifully designed, a website is meaningless without content. The entire premise behind inbound marketing is to catch the attention of people who are looking to inform themselves about your business, services, or something related to your industry. Position yourself as a thought leader in your field. Then you can gain respect in the eyes of potential clients and guide them toward the products or services their situation may require.

3. Use Natural SEO All the Time

There are two kinds of content SEO, natural and deliberate. Natural SEO comes simply from speaking knowledgeably and clearly on topics within your industry. For instance, “How to put up a fence” is informative content. It will have plenty of useful natural keywords for people who would like to find out more about fences before hiring a contractor. All you need to do for a healthy dose of natural SEO is to choose topics that add value for your audience. A landing page can also have natural SEO. It clearly states your company name, location, hours, contact info, and services for local search engine users. Remember, treat your content as if you’re speaking to a human and don’t try to cheat the search engine.

4. Work In Your SEO Keywords

While natural SEO builds with every piece of content you add, deliberate SEO is based on search engine keyword research. Through a combination of techniques, you can discover the hottest search terms that relate to your industry and terms that your customers, in particular, might use. Work them into your content so that they appear in practical places. The best way to do this is simply to write content that naturally integrates this new set of keywords. There are some amazing tools in the market to help with keyword research, two that I use often are ahrefs and Keyword Tool Pro.

5. Pick Your Blog Themes

Company blogs are the primary form of inbound marketing. They give you the opportunity to share a great deal of informative material every month while also creating useful online activity. Of course, writing only one subject or theme can get boring after a while. So make sure to pick several themes and try to address a few in your blogs every month. This will keep your content fresh and lively. Remember, if you are going to commit to a blog, add content regularly and don’t get stale with the subject matter.  You want your audience coming back over and over and not being left to say goodbye.

6. Always Include a Call to Action

When people read or watch inbound marketing, they may enter a more passive learning state. The call to action, something along the lines of “If you’re thinking about building a new fence, contact us for a free consultation!” will remind your audience that they have the opportunity to act on what they have just learned about you, your services, and the topic they came to research.

Calls to action increase the number of people who continue on to make a decision rather than skimming to the next article.

7. Cater To Your Niches

Whatever you sell or whatever services you provide will serve certain populations better than others. Consider who your most motivated audiences are and appeal to them through your inbound marketing. Selling image editing software, for instance, your primary niches are likely to be students, professional visual designers, and photographers. So you can choose inbound marketing topics that will draw in these groups.

8. Build Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are a way to visualize your customers and predict their reactions without actually putting together a focus group. Each persona is an imaginary person with a name, job, family, and motivations who represents an entire sub-section of your audience. For the image editing software example, you might have one student buyer persona who needs the software to do their design homework. You may have one graphic designer who uses the program at work, and one photographer who uses your tablet app to edit photos on-the-go.

9. Get Active on Social Media

You may blog once a week but social media happens all day long. If you really want to get an online audience humming about your business, hire a community manager. They can handle a suite of social media accounts. Through a series of engaging questions, pictures, surveys, and promotional events, you can stir up an interested and even excited social media crowd who will tune into your inbound marketing content even if they don’t find it through a search engine.

In today’s digital climate, there’s never too much inbound marketing, only what you have time for. Believe it or not, this list has only scratched the surface of all the aspects of inbound marketing. There are so many nuanced ways to optimize your results. The best way to cover all your bases from a well-made website to social media management is to know when write your own industry-expert content and what to delegate to a professional outsource team. For more information on how to build a strong digital marketing campaign across multiple platforms with delightful content and videos, contact us today!